This is a piece I wrote for Exhalenow.com — they approached me for a paid piece and it was a blast to do!

I live in the Midwest and the weather has a tendency of saying, “Oh, you think you can’t have all four seasons in one week? Here – hold my beer!” When those times occur our allergies are hit full force. Over the years I’ve researched more organic/homeopathic ways of controlling our seasonal allergies. Then I discovered essential oils (Young Living) and they changed my entire family’s life during allergy season.

Essential oils have been used for ages. They date back to biblical times and were seen and used as the treasures they truly are. It takes 22 minutes for a 100% therapeutic grade essential oil to process through every cell in your body. That’s just insane. I was skeptic at first but after a great deal of research and finding the right brand for my family, I took the dive and invested in an entire line of essential oils.

Along with me and my husband, both of our kids suffer from seasonal allergies. We’ve taken different types of allergy medicines throughout our lives, but just taking a pill won’t make the symptoms go away. We needed to change something else; we needed the extra support and boost to be able to survive the wrath of the Midwest seasons.

What I am about to say is only based off my experience with the brand Young Living, this is very important to know because all essential oil brands are different. There are three different ways you can use essential oils. You can diffuse them in a home diffuser, apply them topically, or ingest them. There are four oils that are key to allergy support; Lemon, Lavender, Peppermint, and RC. Here are two of my favorite ways to use these oils:

Diffusing

• Add three drops of Lemon, Lavender, and Peppermint to your home diffuser. Diffusing the EO’s (essential oils) will fill the house with their organic aroma. This will benefit everyone in the whole house who is breathing in the air. Boom! Two birds with one stone!

• You can also boil water, add the three EO’s, put a small towel over your head, and inhale the oils. This works really well when your allergies are getting pretty rough. The towel traps the moisture, heat, and oils. This helps with releasing sinus pressure and opening up the chest and nasal passages.

Topically

• Essential oils are applied to your pressure points, such as your temples, wrists, bottom of feet, neck, and behind your ears. These points are the fastest way for the oils to enter your system.

• Roller balls are the best thing ever for essential oils! They are super easy to make and very kid friendly! If you are making a roller ball for allergies or applying them topically you will need a carrier oil. Carrier oils dilute essential oils, which is what you want for your kiddos! Add about seven drops of each oil in a 10ML roller ball and then fill the rest with a carrier oil (grapeseed, almond, rose hip, or coconut oil).

If your allergies are becoming intense and congested I suggest using the essential oil blend RC by Young Living. I swear by this oil. It is part of my “First Aid Kit”. RC stands for Respiratory Congestion. The oils blend contains Marjoram for warming, Lavender for calming, Cypress for circulation, Peppermint for invigorating, Spruce, Eucalyptus, and Pine for respiratory support, and Myrtle for fighting infections. I put about three drops of that in my hands with a carrier oil and rub it all over my chest like a name brand vapor rub.

Essential oils can support you through the tough seasons of allergies, without all the toxins from the over the counter stuff that has things in it we can’t even pronounce. I have seen it firsthand. It’s important to keep your kids involved when teaching them about how to use these oils and what they can do to support your body, because just like everything else in their lives, we want them to be educated in what they are putting into their bodies. Now both of my kids have their very own roller balls tucked away in their back packs for whenever they feel their allergies coming on. You might win with the weather Midwest, but we are now prepared for your wrath.

I have had a lot of friends ask me about essential oils lately! Some had got essential oils for Christmas and others purchased a diffuser, but now don’t know what to do with it. Then there are some that have heard of essential oils but don’t know how they work or what they exactly do, but want to know more about the basics of how to get started. I have been using Young Living oils for almost a year now and it has changed my life and my families life completely!

Out of curiosity, how many of you are interested in learning more about essential oils and what they can do for you and your family in your day to day life?

Every year when the weather changes Matt and I have some serious allergy problems. Sneezing, sniffing, coughing, sinus pressure, pretty much just feeling like crap. We started using essential oils every day and every night, rubbing a combination of oils that relieved our allergy symptoms. It kept us moving throughout the day without dragging our feet! Didn’t have to take one allergy pill last year! Not ONE!

I’m here to share with all of you these amazing products and help guide you through your journey of exploring this phenomenal world of essential oils! I feel like I have this huge secret that I just have to share, it’s really that life changing!

For questions or wanting more information about oils you can drop me a comment with your email address and/or question or you can email me directly at notheaveragemama@gmail.com

A great highlight about learning about the Young Living oils is you can do it all from your computer! Technology is amazing and has given the opportunity to share about these oils world wide. We never even have to meet in person for you to buy/start using your starter kit! It’s as easy as a click of a button and after that the endless support and information will keep flowing in! You will have an amazing support system to help guide you through this life changing opportunity!

Real talk. At this very moment, I hate being a woman. These lovely cramps that make their monthly debut feel like someone is carving out my insides. I mean, women shouldn’t be messed with. We can bleed for five days and not die. THAT takes real strength right there.

I use to take every pain killer known to man for my cramps since I started my period. I have had 24 mm cysts form on my ovaries and have to be surgically removed. I have had multiple cysts burst which caused the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life. I dread this week every month of the year. I have tried everything to regulate the pain. I got to the point where I couldn’t take the hard core narcotics anymore. I just started to deal with the pain every month and if that meant having to call off work or spend the day crying in bed from pain, then so be it.

When I first started oils I immediately looked up oils for menstrual cramps and severe PMS. (I literally felt like I was a raging bitch every month and anyone who crossed me was dead to me — seriously, I was horrible.) I found an oil by Young Living called Dragon Time. It’s suppose to help with PMS symptoms and your menstrual cycle. I was skeptical. Of course I was skeptical. I have tried every drug out there known to man to take these cramps away and you’re telling me a single oil could solve my problem?

I did a little more research and found another oil blend called PanAway by Young Living. PanAway is what they like to call, “Pain Away”. It is suppose to help with any sort of pain. You just rub it wherever it hurts. Hmm…I could mix the PanAway and the Dragon Time and see if it works.

I waited for Aunt Flow to arrive and the cramps to kick in and started my experiment with my two new period cramp crusher oils. I counted three drops of each oil, mixed it with my coconut oil, and rubbed it around my abdomen and back where my cramps effect me the most. I laid down on the couch and put the heating pad on me and waited for the magic to happen. The first thirty minutes I had little relief and started to become a little agitated. I didn’t give up because I remember reading that I had to keep reapplying the oils every few hours for my body to begin to work with the oils.

After my second application I started to feel a cooling relief. Are you kidding me?! All of this time I was pumping my body with pain medicine and I could of just used essential oils for the relief?! That is just crazy talk. My mood swings during the week weren’t complete outbursts. I even asked my husband and though he was hesitant at first to answer he said he did notice a change in how I wasn’t snapping. I’m not saying I was the perfect wife and mother after applying the Dragon Time and PanAway, but I wasn’t biting everyone’s heads off for just looking at me. I call that a win in my book.

I’m not trying to sell you on anything, but I know what it’s like to look for alternative health care that doesn’t involve pills that make your body feel like crap. I wanted to find a more natural/organic way of dealing with this week of my life every month that I will never be able to escape.

Any other women out there struggling with similar issues? What do you do to deal with your death gripping cramps each month?

Over the past week I have had a number or emails, comments, and messages from followers. I wanted to say thank you, thank you for your kind words and encouragement this past week as I revamp my blog. Your support means the world to me 🙂

A year ago tomorrow, I began blogging. I began this journey into finding my voice and work through my feelings and emotions of becoming a stepmom. I was six years into the stepmama gig and I was getting to a point where I felt like I was all alone. No one understood what I was going through. No one understood the different emotions I was experiencing, but the worst part was, I didn’t even know how to explain it to anyone else. I couldn’t get out in words how I was feeling. So instead, I alienated the people around me.

I signed up for the A-to-Z Challenge. If you are not familiar with the challenge, it is a fairly simple concept. Every day in the month of April (except Sunday) equals a letter of the alphabet. The 1st is A the 2nd is B and so on. Each day you write a post that begins with the letter and goes with an overall topic you pick for the month. (example: Last year my topic was Being a Stepmama, for B I did, B is for Beach and wrote a post about how our family loves to go to the beach). I planned for this challenge. I had a specific notebook dedicated to the alphabet each day and my ideas for every letter. This opened up the door for me to express my true feelings and explore the emotions I was going through with little prompts to help me.

I realized that I had felt unappreciated. I felt like I was being taken for granted and most of all I felt like I was constantly walking on egg shells with the kid’s mom and nothing I was doing was good enough. These were all feelings I had put in a little box and locked away, but what I didn’t realize was that it was going to continue to eat away at me until I confronted all the issues. Little by little I began to stand up for myself. I would say “No” instead of always saying, “Yes.” — I read a quote that made me stop dead in my tracks and think long and hard about how I was viewing the world around me. “Worrying is literally betting against yourself.”

I mean, it really is isn’t it? You worry you aren’t good enough to get something done. You worry people will be judging you. You worry if things will ever seem to fall into place. I had to change my way of thinking. If I was constantly worrying, how was I even living? Like actually LIVING life and enjoying life. A little after all of this realization is when I began with essential oils and like I’ve said before, they have changed my life in more ways then I thought they would. I researched the oils that would help ME with MY issues. I found new ways to meditate and relax with using oils. I found oils such as Frankincenseand Joythat have changed my entire mood around by just applying a single drop behind my ears and inhaling them cupped around my nose. I began to relax and let things go. I didn’t sweat the small stuff and you know what…no one died, everything was okay and the world didn’t fall apart just because I had to relinquish control.